I merged this content together into a big Compiling LaTeX tip Compiling LaTeX from Vim. So this page should be deleted, but I cant add the merged tag since that newly created page isn't a tip yet. I merged the stuff from this tip into the last section on Compiling LaTeX from Vim.

Vim's quickfix mode is a very nice feature. Nevertheless, I was not completely satisfied when I used it together with (La)TeX. Here are the main reasons:

The default error format pattern is able to extract the line number and the error message, but not the column number.

This pattern is of course unable to deal with BibTeX's or MakeIndex's error messages.

TeX's messages are quite verbose. Having them displayed at each run, even when no error occurs is sometimes annoying.

Thus I implemented TeXwrapper, a small program which silently runs TeX and optionally some associated tool like BibTeX, MakeIndex, eukleides or Dvips. When an error occurs, TeXwrapper scans the transcript files and prints to stderr "compiler style" error messages, i.e.:

Another feature is the --window option (short: -w). When something goes wrong, a GTK+ window pops up, displaying a summary of the encountered errors. Hence, one may use: "silent make -w %" which enables to avoid the "Hit ENTER or type command to continue" message at each run.

TeXwrapper has been developed on a GNU/Linux system, but it should build on any system where flex has been ported. The pop up window is opened by a separate program, named texwrapper_window, which of course requires the GTK+ library.